The Miracle

       Octavia Lafleur had a miserable life. Her father died when she was only three years old. Her mother remarried less than a year later. Her stepfather sexually abused her when she was eight. At fourteen, she had her first sexual experience with a boy. Her mother died when she was fifteen. She married an alcoholic oilfield worker when she was seventeen, and from then on, rode a roller coaster of alcohol abuse, prostitution, and homelessness. Then, when her life was at its lowest point, she met Snook, an illiterate helper at a local grocery store, and her life changed.

       She needed a place to stay, and Snook longed to learn how to read and write, so she followed him to his remote shack in the country and moved in. At first, she figured that her arrangement with him would include sex, but to her surprise, he didn't seem to be interested in that. As Snook learned to read and write, Octavia realized that he was not as simple as she first thought. She was enjoying her new life with him.

       Then a miracle happened, and it turned her world upside down again.

       "The Miracle" is a long short story that follows the life of a woman from her earliest memories to the miraculous ending. Here is the beginning:

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       It was a miserably cold Louisiana day. Low dark clouds surged in from the north, pushing ahead of them a frigid wind that bent trees and rattled tin roofs. A mix of rain and ice coated everything in its path causing trees to rattle like skeletons. The temperature was just at freezing, but the wind and the icy rain made it feel much colder.

       Octavia Lafleur sat on her front porch and rocked back and forth oblivious to the cold. She stared past the frozen fallowed fields, past the serpentine lane that led from Snook's shack to the graveled road, past everything to a point on the horizon where dark clouds met the frozen land, looking altogether like a giant black hole sucking everything it touched, houses, trees, and fields, into its dark interior.

       The cold penetrated the thin shirt she wore, but she felt nothing, her heart as cold as the wintry wind cutting through her.

***

        I hope you appreciate and enjoy "The Miracle." It is a story dear to my heart for it loosely mirrors the journey someone dear to me followed and contains an ending that it might have taken.